For a while now, I’ve been referring to the WordPress news media as the “Word Press”. When I was leading the 4.2 release, I made a special point of trying to keep the Word Press informed on what we were doing.

Anyway, the name stuck (in my own mind at least).

So who are the current Word Press you ask? Well, the big players right now are (in no particular order):

In this session, Drew will be sharing insight into how a WordPress release happens, including an overview of all the moving parts, teams, organization, and execution. A lot of people have this idea that the core team is solely responsible for new versions of WordPress getting released, which couldn’t be further from the truth – it’s an intricate ballet of multiple contributor teams coming together and executing a broad vision.
He will talk about how a release cycle is structured, how and where the decision-making happens, as well as all of the various contributors and teams that play their own part in a successful release. It’s very much opening the black box of how a release works.

We’re at a point now where we have these incredibly powerful query classes in WordPress core that allow you to really tailor down to whatever criterion you want. In this workshop, Drew will provide some real-world examples of some crazy stuff you can do with queries – it’s very much a “sky’s the limit” kind of situation. Queries are really interesting and powerful, and a lot of people are intimidated by advanced queries, even with the abstraction layers that WordPress has put in place.

This year has seen a lot of positive change in the WordPress contributor community, especially in the area of accessibility.

Take for instance, the appearance this year of two new faces on the credits screen as of WordPress 4.3:

Andrea Fercia makes his second appearance and Rian Rietveld her first on the WordPress 4.3 credits screen.

Andrea Fercia (@afercia) has made serious waves during the WordPress 4.2 and 4.3 cycles as an accessibility team liaison to the core team. In his time contributing to WordPress, he’s injected a considerable amount of valuable feedback and experience – in addition to development chops – to helping make WordPress accessible all-around. I’m excited to see how WordPress will change for the better with Andrea leading the charge.

Rian Rietveld (@rianrietveld) more recently has taken a leadership role in helping to wrangle an accessibility testing team that has already pointed out some pretty big problems with both new and existing core features. We only benefit from having more people examining these experiences, and the accessibility testing team is worth their weight in gold on that front.

Of course, we can’t forget the contributions of accessibility team member Joe Dolson (@joedolson) either, seeing as he was featured as a recent rockstar in WordPress 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2. Joe has been a valued contributor for a long time and I look forward to seeing what he’s working on next.

I think as we progress in further asserting accessibility in WordPress as a priority, we’ll see even more new faces make appearances in future releases. It’s a testament to the quality of work coming out of this team that makes, for me, 2015 the year of accessibility in WordPress.

If you’re interested in getting involved with the accessibility team, check out the accessibility site on the WordPress.org “Make” network, or drop into the #accessibility channel on Slack and say hello. They meet weekly on Mondays at 18:00 UTC.

Once you’ve installed WordPress, what now? For new users, that’s just one of a multitude of inevitable questions. What’s a post? A page? A theme? Where should I start first? In a short attention-span world, first impressions are everything, and WordPress is making it harder than it needs to be for new users.

There’s a case to be made for helping to guide users through the process of post-install set up. In fact, there’s user testing data that makes the case for us.

The goal of this talk is to examine that test data – taken against existing and potential wp-admin flows – and form conclusions about how WordPress can get out of its own way to improve the new user experience. We’ll talk about solutions that exist in the community right now, and opportunities to get involved in reshaping WordPress’ first impressions.